Henri Guigonnat

French writer Henri Guigonnat, at the age of twenty-five, won the first-ever Prix de l’Insolite (Prize for the Unusual) from the town of Agde for his first and only novel, Daemon in Lithuania. An absurd and poetic story about an boy, a cat, and an alternate Lithuania, the book won him comparisons to Lewis Carrol, Jean Cocteau, and Voltaire, among others.

Dæmon in Lithuania

Fiction by Henri Guigonnat

Translated by Barbara Wright

Here is a book that is elegant, good-humored, innocent, perverse, poetic, funny, extravagant, preposterous, limpid, insouciant, and philosophic. It has led readers to invoke comparisons to Hans Christian Andersen, Lewis Carroll, Cocteau, La Fontaine, Ronald Firbank, Giraudoux, Julien Gracq, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Laurence Sterne, Voltaire. In 1974, when it was published in France, it won for its twenty-five-year-old author wide critical acclaim and the first Prix de l’Insolite. In sum, a one-of-a-kind delight.…
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